A Practice of BLE RSSI Measurement for Indoor Positioning.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one of the RF-based technologies that has been utilizing Received Signal Strength Indicators (RSSI) in indoor position location systems (IPS) for decades. Its recent signal stability and propagation distance improvement inspired us to conduct this project. Beacons and scanners used two Bluetooth specifications, BLE 5.0 and 4.2, for experimentations. The measurement paradigm consisted of three segments, RSSI-distance conversion, multi-beacon in-plane, and diverse directional measurement. The analysis methods applied to process the data for precise positioning included the Signal propagation model, Trilateration, Modification coefficient, and Kalman filter. As the experiment results showed, the positioning accuracy could reach 10 cm when the beacons and scanners were at the same horizontal plane in a less-noisy environment. Nevertheless, the positioning accuracy dropped to a meter-scale accuracy when the measurements were executed in a three-dimensional configuration and complex environment. According to the analysis results, the BLE wireless signal strength is susceptible to interference in the manufacturing environment but still workable on certain occasions. In addition, the Bluetooth 5.0 specifications seem more promising in bringing brightness to RTLS applications in the future, due to its higher signal stability and better performance in lower interference environments.

Chemical fluid deposition of monometallic and bimetallic nanoparticles on ordered mesoporous silica as hydrogenation catalysts.

A simple and green method of depositing monometallic (Ru, Rh, Pd) and bimetallic nanoparticles (Ru-Rh, Ru-Pd and Rh-Pd) on an ordered mesoporous silica support (MCM-41) in supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) is described. Metal acetylacetonates were used in the experiments as CO2-soluble metal precursors. Suitable temperature and pressure conditions for synthesizing each kind of nanoparticles were applied in this study. The characterizations of these nanocomposites were performed by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS). The nanoparticles had average sizes varying from 2 nm to 8 nm. The Ru nanoparticles were clearly shown to be inside the mesopores of MCM-41 from the TEM image. These nanocomposites used as catalysts for hydrogenation was demonstrated. The efficiency of the scCO2 prepared Ru/MCM-41 catalyst was nearly 8 times than that of a Ru/MCM-41 catalyst prepared by conventional impregnation method.